Dear Writers,

It’s New Year’s time, time to reflect and encourage ourselves to set goals we long to achieve. For me, it’s also the time of year that marks the anniversary of the snowboarding accident that took my son’s life. At the end of December 2000, friends and family gathered in Seattle and in Port Townsend, WA for Seth’s memorial services. Every year after that, on the date of the accident, Seth’s step-dad Kurt and I have gone to watch the sunrise over Admiralty Bay. Each year, we look forward to what nature will show us, transformations in the water’s ripples, the birds’ visitations and flight, the shadows on the large boulder that sits in front of a grouping of benches with plaques in Seth’s memory.

Twenty-five years old when he died, Seth was an architect and often spoke to us about the way he viewed public and private spaces. This year, I sat viewing the unicorn shape I discovered a few years ago, formed by crevices in the boulder. As I got up to  walk to the water’s edge, I noticed two blue bins for the first time—one marked Trash sat in a round cement holder placed near the benches; the other, marked Recycling, sat next to it, but without a cement holder. At first, I didn’t think about how out of character this sighting was compared to the kind of nature imagery that speaks so deeply to Kurt and me.

I did think about how Seth was a neat freak, about how he took out his trash and recycling daily. In California where he went to school and lived with his fiancée Kristen, he hated the ants that invaded his kitchen because the landlady kept the trash cans too close to the building; at least that was what Seth surmised. I am positive he would have liked a pen to surround these cans near the wooden, slat-topped benches and that he would have been pleased with each bench because it has a lock and can double as storage, a good use of space.

I smiled thinking these things. Then I noticed the tree growing alongside the boulder I had been staring at, a shore pine. Two bins, trash and recycling. A unicorn sheltered by a shore pine. Needles of the shore pine in clusters of two. It wasn’t long before I set out to do my job as a writer—make what I observed meaningful.

The trash and recycling bins could represent the attributes of our lives that impact others. On the New Year, we resolve to rid ourselves of what we don’t wish to carry along—jealousy, self-centeredness and mean-spiritedness, to name some of what is unwanted but seems to sit inside, unmovable. On the New Year, we also think of ways to reuse and recycle what we most want to share with others—our knowledge, our wisdom and our love.

Unicorns are symbols not only of purity but also of wild, untamable agility and strength. Shore pines grow in difficult conditions. Those of us who loved Seth found ways to grow in the difficult weather of loss, discovered the strength and agility we needed to go on. The needle bundles of the shore pines are twin spears from one binding; observation and meaning wrapped together at the source.

“So, Seth,“ I typed when I got home:

I was in Hawaii last week with your sister and her husband, your two nephews ages six and nine, your grandma three weeks short of 85, Kurt and your brother-in-law’s parents—four generations. One day, we gathered to play with and learn about dolphins, their 80 to 100 teeth each the same in perfect rows on top and bottom of their long mouths, their skin soft and slippery as the lining under a hard-boiled egg’s shell. Homodonts, they are called, because they have one kind of tooth, which erupts when they are calves and must last a life time. The surface of their epidermis is replaced up to every two hours for smooth hydrodynamics and to prevent the colonization of fouling organisms on their skin.

That you would have loved learning how a dolphin keeps the surface of its skin clean makes me smile.  That you, like a dolphin, were designed for speed as you raced on your mountain bike. That you, like a dolphin, had perfect rows of teeth that required no orthodontia. That you, like our group, honored the many generations of our family. All of this makes me smile.

I know you would be slightly embarrassed that I am writing about you, so I’ll tell you, as I have many times, writing helps me as a parent, grandparent, wife, daughter, teacher, friend. In writing, I recycle, reuse, and discard—all attributes that keep one agile. You always wanted me to be able to ride up curbs. I couldn’t do it on a mountain bike, but I can in writing.  I meld the present and the past to keep alive what is most important in me. “Everyone needs an adventure,” you once told me. In this writing life, I engage in one that is ongoing. I coax out what is hidden and locked up, see it open and revealed like the chest of a cormorant drying its wings in the sun.

With love and with thanks,

Your Mom

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To all of you who write, may 2012 be filled with the twosomes of observation and meaning, strength and agility in your art. And may the meanings you make help those who read your work find their own capacities filled as well.

Best wishes,

Sheila Bender